Citation: Miorelli, Luca (2017) The Development of Morpho-Syntactic Competence in Italian- Speaking Children: a Usage-Based Approach. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/39990/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html 2017 Northumbria University Luca Miorelli THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORPHO- SYNTACTIC COMPETENCE IN ITALIAN-SPEAKING CHILDREN: A USAGE-BASED APPROACH Volume I of II Supervisors: Prof. Ewa Dąbrowska Dr James Street The Development of Morpho- Syntactic Competence in Italian-Speaking Children: A Usage-Based Approach Luca Miorelli A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Sciences October 2017 ABSTRACT Usage-Based scholars (e.g. Lieven et al., 2009) have shown that children’s early grammar is characterisable as knowledge of lexically-specific patterns (kick KICKEE) learnt from previously encountered strings (kick it). Experimental research (e.g. Lewis, 2009) has shown that children younger than four years cannot use nonce verbs in constructions in which they have never experienced them. Productivity with nonce verbs slowly improves throughout the preschool years, as adultlike schemas (e.g. AGENT-PROCESS-PATIENT) gradually emerge in ontogeny (Tomasello, 2006b). However, such results are overwhelmingly based on studies of English-speaking children and it is unclear how well they generalise to other languages. The research presented in this thesis enquired into whether a Usage-Based Approach could account for the acquisition of Italian. A longitudinal study investigated whether the spontaneous production of an Italian-speaking two-year-old could be accounted for in terms of lexically- specific units instantiated in the concrete strings he had previously experienced. An experimental study tapped into the development of 2;02-to-5;0-year-old Italian-speakers’ productivity with past participles and the transitive construction using both a nonce verb and a familiar verb. Results on syntactic development were consistent with previous findings regarding English-speaking children (Akhtar, 1999; Lieven et al., 2009). The overwhelming majority of the child’s spontaneous production (82%) could be derived from previously encountered lexically-specific patterns. In the experimental setting, children younger than four years could not produce adultlike transitive sentences with a nonce verb they had not experienced in that construction. As for morphological productivity, even two-year-olds used the nonce verb productively. Such results are discussed in terms of how the co-occurrence of high type and token frequency that characterises the Italian morphology may facilitate form-function mapping. Overall results are consistent with Usage-Based Models, suggesting that such approaches have cross-linguistic validity. i Page intentionally left blank ii TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME I Abstract ................................................................................................... i Table of Contents .................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations (A-H) ................................................................... ix List of Abbreviations (I-S)...................................................................... x List of Abbreviations (T-Z) .................................................................... xi Acknowledgments .................................................................................. xiii Author’s Declaration .............................................................................. xv A Filippo “Phil” Martello ....................................................................... xvii 0. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 3 0.1. Why Study Language Acquisition ................................................... 3 0.2. Nature vs. Nurture ........................................................................... 5 0.3. The Current Research ...................................................................... 12 0.4. Structure of the Thesis ..................................................................... 13 Part I: Background 1. THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE .......................................................... 17 1.1. Morphological System ..................................................................... 17 1.2. Null Subject ..................................................................................... 28 1.3. Clitic Pronouns ................................................................................ 30 1.4. Word Order ...................................................................................... 36 1.5. Assigning Thematic Roles ............................................................... 42 1.6. Summary .......................................................................................... 43 2. A USAGE-BASED APPROACH TO LANGUAGE ..................... 45 2.1. Language and General Cognitive Processes .................................... 45 2.2. Linguistic Units ............................................................................... 46 iii 2.3. A Dynamic and Highly Interconnected Network ............................ 58 2.4. Language Use................................................................................... 65 2.5. The Dynamicity of the System ........................................................ 75 2.6. A Unified Account ........................................................................... 82 3. A USAGE-BASED APPROACH TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ...................................................... 85 3.1. Acquiring Symbolic Units ............................................................... 86 3.2. Lexically-Specific (Concrete) Competence ..................................... 89 3.3. Constructing a Language ................................................................. 93 3.4. Evidence From Italian ...................................................................... 98 3.5. The Traceback Method .................................................................... 100 3.6. More on Children's Linguistic Representation ................................ 104 3.7. Is Naturalistic Data Enough? ........................................................... 106 3.8. Experimental Methods ..................................................................... 109 3.9. Towards Fully-Schematic Constructions ......................................... 118 3.10. A Weak Transitive Schema ........................................................... 125 3.11. Summary ........................................................................................ 138 4. DESIGN RATIONALE .................................................................... 141 4.1. The Quest for Cross-Linguistic Validity.......................................... 142 4.2. Design and Research Questions ....................................................... 142 4.3. A Final Remark ................................................................................ 145 Part II: The Spontaneous Productions of a Two-year-old Child 5. INTRODUCTION............................................................................. 149 6. METHOD .......................................................................................... 151 6.1. Participants ....................................................................................... 151 6.2. Data Collection ................................................................................ 152 6.3. Procedure ......................................................................................... 154 iv 6.4. Methodological Choices .................................................................. 178 7. RESULTS .......................................................................................... 195 7.1. Quantitative Results ......................................................................... 195 7.2. An Insight into Roberto's Inventory of Constructions ..................... 205 7.3. Cross-Linguistic Comparison .......................................................... 210 7.4. Summary of Results ......................................................................... 215 8. ANALYSIS ........................................................................................ 217 8.1. The Emergence of Morpho-Syntactic Overgeneralisations ............. 218 8.2. Morphological Fails ......................................................................... 229 8.3. Soft_Constructional_Fails